Emendations in medieval texts – the problem of their interpretation and editing (on the example of the court record from the Poznań Land Book II)

Abstract

The main problem presented in the article and its title revolves around the term emendation. The author presents this problem from two perspectives. The first is the interference of the medieval scribe into the text which is evidenced by the deletions and corrections introduced by the writer. The second perspective is the activity of the researcher-editor who reads the manuscript, interprets, and publishes it, using imprecise publishing rules. This, in turn, leads to a distortion of the source text. The conducted analyzes showed that the adopted principles of publishing medieval texts should be such as to preserve all the features of the manuscript that relate to the writer's understanding of the text, and which are blurred in the process of interpretation by a modern publisher.